Performance of Block-level Storage Caching

Block-level storage systems are commonly used due to their flexibility and versatility. Current technologies such as Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies over IP offer users the capability to consolidate and manage storage resources efficiently. However, scalability issues may arise under the load of many clients. A potential solution for this problem can be local disk caching. A blocklevel cache can support performance improvements by leveraging data locality on the client-side. In order to analyze the benefits of block-level caching and the factors that affect its performance, this paper presents a series of benchmarking evaluations performed on dm-cache. Dm-cache is general block-level cache tool designed to support the use of a block a device as another device's cache.